Insurance Backed Guarantee vs Manufacturer’s Warranty: What’s the Difference?
Published: October 22, 2025
Both of these are great tools to help protect homeowners when they make the decision to invest in their home. However, if you want to make the most of these tools, then it’s important to make sure that you really understand how they work.
So, what do you need to know about Insurance Backed Guarantees and Manufacturer Warranties?
Here’s the short version:
- An Insurance Backed Guarantee (IBG) covers you when the quality of your installation is compromised;
- A Manufacturer’s Warranty, on the other hand, covers you when the quality of the product itself isn’t up to scratch;
As you can tell, both are incredibly important, but for completely different reasons and in completely different situations.
If you’d like to learn a little more about the nuances between the two, then that’s exactly what we’re covering in this post. Starting with some more specific definitions of both…
What is an Insurance Backed Guarantee?
According to Qualitymark — one of the UK’s foremost providers of IBGs — an Insurance Backed Guarantee can be defined like this:
“An Insurance backed guarantee provides financial protection to homeowners, in the event their installer ceases to trade and is unable to honour their written guarantee.
This provides homeowners with peace of mind, confidence, and trust in their installer and home improvement.”
In other words, an Insurance Backed Guarantee ensures that homeowners will be able to get a refund for faulty installations, even if the business that did the work goes out of business before the homeowner can make a claim.
In essence, it’s a financial safety-net. One designed to provide peace-of-mind to homeowners who are investing in long-term upgrades, like an upgrade to the insulation in your home. Allowing you to make large investments without worrying.
What is a Manufacturer’s Warranty?
While these can vary a little bit in what they cover, they all fundamentally serve the same purpose: they guarantee that a product will last for (at least) a set lifetime, and that the product will provide a certain level of performance during that guaranteed lifetime.
The guaranteed lifetime, and performance, of the product will vary from product to product and from manufacturer to manufacturer. But, the point of a warranty like this is to provide a baseline of what a user can expect from any given product.
The main caveat for warranties like these is that they are only applicable for products used reasonably. In other words, they won’t cover you if your product fails early because it was used or installed improperly.
For example, you’ll have a hard time getting money back for a phone that stops working after getting run over. It might not be your fault, but that’s also outside of the reasonable expectations you can put on the manufacturer of the phone.
Why We Don’t Provide Insurance Backed Guarantees?
To put it simply, it’s because we don’t directly install our insulation products. The purpose of a an IBG is to guarantee that the installation has been completed correctly. Given that we are a manufacturer, and not an installer, it wouldn’t make sense for us to provide a guarantee for a service that we are not providing.
What’s more, there are major businesses that are established specifically to provide Insurance Backed Guarantees for professional insulation installers (and many other professional services), as such it wouldn’t make sense for us to do the same. After all, companies like QualityMark and the Installation Assurance Authority (IAA) already provide all the infrastructure needed to ensure that any installer wishing to offer an IBG will be more than capable of doing so.
What’s more, the fact that IBGs are provided by third party companies is actually a major benefit, because that means that your project will be guaranteed even if your original installer’s company goes under. That means that you shouldn’t ever find yourself unable to claim restitution for a sub-par installation job, since the IBG company will provide payment in place of the installer.
Can you still get an insurance backed guarantee for SuperFOIL?
You absolutely can!
It is not always a guarantee that an installer will provide an insurance backed guarantee for the work they do, so it’s very important to make sure you confirm that they will do so ahead of time.
Of course, if you have yet to find an installer for your project and an IBG is important to you, then making use of our Approved Installer network could be the best way to find an installer offering IBGs who is trained to work with SuperFOIL.
SuperFOIL insulatoin is tested and certified by KIWA BDA, amongst other certification bodies, meaning our products are absolutely viable for Insurance Backed Guarantees. However, as we have mentioned, these guarantees will need to be provided to you by your installer and so we would always recommend speaking to your installer about an IBG for you project before any work begins.
Are we trying to avoid responsibility?
We’ve been asked if the reason we don’t offer Insurance Backed Guarantees is because we’re attempting to shift blame or avoid responsibility; but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is making sure we’re taking responsibility for the services and products that we are providing to you. We’re a manufacturer not an installer, and that means that we’re responsible for guaranteeing the quality of the products we produce, not how well they are installed.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that we are simply washing our hands of installations entirely. In fact, that’s exactly why we established our Approved Installer Programme — to help provide professional installers with every bit of support we possibly can.
From free training on installation best-practices all the way up to continuing technical support on every project, we make a point to provide our Approved Installers with as much support as we can. And it’s all in an effort to ensure that every SuperFOIL customers get the best service possible.
Our Manufacturer’s Warranty
Speaking of our responsibilities, we take the quality of our products incredibly seriously. As the UK’s leading manufacturer of multifoils, it’s essential that you can rely on SuperFOIL products to perform at an industry defining level — and continue performing at that level for years to come. And that’s why we provide our 25-year manufacturer’s warranty on every single SuperFOIL product. More details of our warranty can be found here. However, it essentially boils down to this:
“Any appropriately installed SuperFOIL product, under the terms of the warranty, which fails to provide it’s rated performance for at least 25 years is consider to be defective. In this situation we will either (depending on the situation) fully refund the original price of the product, or provide you with a suitable replacement product.”
Just as it’s your installers responsibility to guarantee the quality of their installation for years to come, it’s our responsibility to guarantee the lasting quality of the products themselves.
We’re incredibly proud to say that SuperFOIL insulation will provide a lifetime of quality insulation to your home, and we take that promise seriously.
It’s our hope that, between our Manufacturer’s Warranty and your installer’s Insurance Backed Guarantee, homeowners like you will be able to invest in an upgrade to their home’s insulation without fear of getting anything less than their money’s worth from that investment. After all, insulation is hands-down one of the very best investments a homeowner can make to improve the comfort and quality of their home, and it’s our mission to make those investments easier and more affordable than ever before!
The Difference
So, putting everything else aside. What’s the main difference, to you, between an Insurance Backed Guarantee and our Manufacturer’s Warranty? It pretty much boils down to what they cover…
An Insurance Backed Guarantee Covers…
The quality and long-term performance of your installer’s work.
An IBG guarantees that your insulation has been installed properly, and according to any and all guidance provided by the manufacturer of the materials provided.
Our Manufacturer’s Warranty Covers…
The warranty is designed to protect you from the unlikely situation that a SuperFOIL product installed in your home is defective.
In which case, we would either refund or replace the product, depending on the circumstances.
As you can tell, one isn’t really “better” than the other. They’re both important, because they cover different potential scenarios — which means it’s pretty much always worth taking the time to make sure you have both.
Of course, you don’t need to do anything special to “get” our manufacturer’s guarantee. All of our products are covered by it. But if you want an insurance backed guarantee too, you’ll need to take a little bit of extra time to find an installer that will provide one.
What Now?
Well, if you’re planning on looking for an installer who can provide you with an insurance backed guarantee, then you should consider connecting with one of our Approved Installers. Especially since our massive network of over 900 professional installers allows us to majorly streamline the process of finding an expert installer for your project!
So, if you’d like us to do the work of finding an installer for you, then all it’ll cost you is a few minutes of your time spent filling out our simple Find An Installer form…
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